Help 120 South African children attend pre-school

As our academic year draws to a close, we have much to celebrate and many happy memories despite many challenges. Most importantly, our students have enjoyed another fabulous year. They have excelled in so many fields. We have once again achieved higher academic results compared to previous years, which makes me proud. Your donations have allowed us to cover all of our school’s operating cost this year. Your donation has also assisted us in our students being schoolready, creating a safe school environment, breaking the poverty cycle and empowering the Dunoon community. These victories are not small in any way. That is why you gave, and that is why everyone at Ubunye is grateful for your generosity. As we plan and set our goals for the new year, we wish to build on the successes of our school so that we can improve even more. I hope you have a great festive season with your loved ones and a happier, healthier and prosperous New Year.

As I reflect on the past six months, I am grateful for the collective generosity of past donors and friends like you who have been instrumental to our progress in reaching our goals.

By investing in our core programs, we have seen tremendous growth.

Our achievements thus far:

1. We have seen an increase in our academic results. This, means that we delivering quality early childhood education for 120 children aged 5 - 6 from Dunoon Township to prepare them for primary education. 

2. Our routine paediatric health check-ups assisted us in establishing any barriers to learning our leaners have. We are addressing these barriers through intervention plans.

3.   We are able to provide 120 children with two balanced meals every school day to meet the nutritional needs for their growth and development and eradicate child hunger at Ubunye.

4.   In light of South Africa’s reading crisis, we continue with our reading programme to promote a love for reading from a young age.

5. Parent involvement plays a critical part in young children’s development, and we foster this by involving our parents in our parenting skills programme. We successfully graduated 40 parents through an eight-week training in collaboration with WordWorks, a local NGO that facilitates a learning space for parents inwhich to share knowledge and ideas about children’s language and early literacy development.

Ubunye had a financial setback at the beginning of the year, as one of our long-standing donors withdrew much-needed funding due to their financial situation. We are currently only covering 61% of our school costs. We have put some strategies in place to recuperate these funds. 

I believe we will see more donors, like you come on board to help us educate 120 children and enable them to be school-ready. 

I am also proud of our achievements thus far and look forward to the next half of the year. On behalf of all of us here at Ubunye Educare Centre, thank you.